Inside the Lucasfilm datacenter

passthecrackpipe writes "Where can you find a (rhetorical) 11.38 petabits per second bandwidth? It appears to be inside the Lucasfilm Datacenter. At least, that is the headline figure mentioned in this report on a tour of the datacenter. The story is a bit light on the down-and-dirty details, but mentions a 10 gig ethernet backbone (adding up the bandwidth of a load of network connections seems to be how they derived the 11.38 petabits p/s figure. In that case, I have a 45 gig network at home.) Power utilization is a key differentiator when buying hardware, a "legacy" cycle of a couple of months, and 300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter. To me, the story comes across as somewhat hyped up — "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing, "look how cool we are". Over the last couple of years, I have been in many datacenters, for banks, pharma and large enterprise to name a few, that have somewhat larger and more complex setups."

300tb

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that all? Most datacenters that house more than 1 large customer usually starts at about 300tb, nothing to write home about. Most customers using sap use a lot more.

Submitter

[kevin_conaway]

Well passthecrackpipe, if you and your vast knowledge of large scale datacenters are not impressed with the story, why the hell did you submit it?

Penis.... er.... Data Envy?

[Snydley Whiplash]

Why all the negativity toward Lucas? Jar Jar's dead man, let it go. George said he was sorry already. I think it's a good story. It's absolutely fascinating to me to see how they make movies today, how much data gets pushed around, and how they make sure that the creative people have access to what they need, when they need it. And they do all this to support incredible time schedules, with boatloads of cash riding on every second. I don't know how anyone can say that this isn't an impressive operation. As for Lucas thinking they are so great... well, they pretty much are. I'd say that being organization that created the special effects for tons of blockbuster movies and being nominated for several major movie industry awards pretty much gives them some bragging rights.

And they drive to work at 2400mph

[viking80]

300TB storage and 11 petabits/s bandwidth.

This means

A) they can push their entire storage through the network in 300*8Tb/(11Pb/s)=200ms.
or
B) the article author does not have a clue.

I think an anlogy would be: I drive back and forth to work everyday, or 400 times a year. My speed on each trip is 60mph, so in a year my speed is 60x400 or 24000mph.

For all the knocks of this center

[WindBourne]

I have to wonder how many systems they have? They accomplish a great deal with what is a fairly small area. I would guess that they each computer has major ram and is simply NFSed back to a central server.

What I have found funny is the number of ppl who are speaking of how big their centers. Offhand, I tend to suspect that those centers could go on a MAJOR f%^&ing diet and need to have their budgets cut to a fifth. And finally, it is time to fire a bunch of the incompetents who can not run a tight center.